WATERING THE ROOTS OF ASTROLOGICAL

THEORY AND PRACTICE:

Gaston Bachelards Contribution to a Philosophy of Divination

Jean Hinson Lall

From:
Angela Voss and Jean Hinson Lall, eds.,
The Imaginal Cosmos: Astrology, Divination and the Sacred
Canterbury: The University of Kent, 2007, pp. 109-126
(Revised edition forthcoming 2016 from Rubedo Press)

Copyright 2007 by Jean Hinson Lall

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WATERING THE ROOTS OF ASTROLOGICAL

THEORY AND PRACTICE:
Gaston Bachelards Contribution to a Philosophy of Divination
Jean Hinson Lall (University of Kent)

Introduction: The imaginal cosmos of divination

Ah, not to be cut off,

not through the slightest partition
shut out from the law of the stars.
The inner - what is it?
if not intensified sky,
hurled through with birds and deep
with the winds of homecoming.1

These oft-quoted lines from a modern poet reflect the persistence of the divinatory cosmos
in a scientific age. Rilke evokes the ancient practice of augury, divination by means of the flight
of birds across a ritually marked-out segment of the heavens, as well as the law of the stars,
astrology. Sky, stars, birds, and winds belong to the imagination of air, one of the four elements
recognised by early Greek philosophy as the fundamental matter of which all things and all
beings, including the soul, are compounded. It is this inner and intensified elemental reality
which is the ground of divination, and also of our sense of being at home in the cosmos.
In my home city of Baltimore, this weekend marks the festive inauguration of a new exhibit
entitled Holy H2O: Fluid Universe at the American Visionary Art Museum.2 Although I had to
miss the opening in order to be here and take part in the conference, I drew inspiration for my
talk from the photograph (figure 1) used in the poster for the show. It features the visionary
artist J. B. Murry, looking for all the world like an elemental spirit, smiling out at us as if to
announce, We are still here! Water, earth, fire and air are indeed still present as profound
realities of the imagination, not only for diviners, psychologists and artists but for all of us in
our daily experience of the world.
Research, theory, and philosophical reflection on divination must begin from an
understanding of this material and cosmological basis, so different from that of science.
Divinatory practices such as those of astrology are typically quite material and concrete both
in their aims and in their methods, yet for the scientific mentality, steeped in its own kind of
material concreteness, the diviners imaginal matter may prove elusive, or appear illusory.
When we speak of an imaginal cosmology we refer to the kind of view of reality which
human beings and human societies seem naturally to develop when left to themselves without
the burdens and benefits of a modern scientific education. Such a world-picture may, as Patrick
Curry has suggested, be local, animistic and pluralistic or it may be universal and monistic or
monotheistic.3 Regardless of such variations, however, it is a complete and coherent view of a
meaningful world. A traditional cosmology sustains the peoples existence, placing them in the
world and in relation to the gods and to the entire created order. It undergirds and is reinforced
by everything they do: farming or food-gathering, art and craft, marriage and procreation,
education of the young, decoration of the body, home-building, governance, speculative thought,
ethics, ritual, and even scientific investigation.
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Figure 1.
Artist J. B. Murry with a bottle of holy spirit water used to
interpret his visionary paintings. Photograph by Roger Manley.
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Such world-views are fundamentally works of imagination. As distinct from the

contemporary idea of mere imagination (as in its just your imagination) or idle fantasy or
self-delusion, or something extra we hope to encourage in our children, I am speaking of
imagination as a creative, even a cosmogonic power, the primary organ by means of which we
grasp reality and participate in the unfolding of the cosmos. This understanding of imagination
as a creative organ of perception is essential to Western esoteric traditions, with philosophical
foundations in neoplatonism, hermeticism and Islamic mysticism, revived and passed down to
us via Renaissance philosophers and Romantic poets.
Imagination and cosmos belong together. Cosmos in the traditional sense implies not a
meaning-free, secular, homogeneous extension to infinity of unintelligent and inert matter, a
universe comprehensible only to astrophysicists, but a meaningful and ordered, sacred and
intelligent organism, a living world that is our home.
Since the scientific revolution and the Enlightenment, it has been the aim of Western
thought to break free of the imaginal and to create a world picture based entirely on
quantitatively established facts and critical reason. We live, consequently, in a different
psychological, spiritual, intellectual, and physical universe than did our ancestors, and the
imaginal cosmos has come to be regarded as a realm of superstition and error. Yet the
imagination, being such a vital part of our makeup, persists, as does the need to situate ourselves
cosmically. Both, however, have been exiled to the realm of personal subjectivity, given over to
poets and dreamers. Contemporary outcroppings of the imaginal cosmos in poetry and other art
forms are considered more or less unproblematic, since art is regarded as mere self-expression
and not as a force which might challenge the normal scientific-technical world view. More
troublesome are the archaic cosmologies of the dream world we enter at night and the
persistence, despite our rationalist intentions, of mythic patterns in our waking existence.
Cosmos and its imagination, lacking shelter in the house of philosophy, make themselves at
home among the depth psychologists.4
For C. G. Jung, the study of alchemy was a major source of insight into the imaginal cosmos.
In the sixteenth-century alchemical text Rosarium Philosophorum he noted the following
guidance regarding the use of imaginatio:

And take care that thy door be well and firmly closed, so that he who is within
cannot escape, and - God willing - thou wilt reach the goal. Nature performeth
her operations gradually; and indeed I would have thee do the same: let thy
imagination be guided wholly by nature. And observe according to nature,
through whom the substances regenerate themselves in the bowels of the earth.
And imagine this with true and not with fantastic imagination.5

Jung comments that in contrast to idle fantasy (fantastic imagination), in which the mind
simply toys with its objects, true imagination involves an effort to grasp the inner facts and
portray them in images true to their nature. 6 In figure 2 we see a typical alchemical depiction
of some of these inner facts of matter.
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Figure 2.
The seven planetary deities as metals in the depths of the earth,
surrounded by four kinds of fire. Engraving number 18 by J. D. Mylius,
Philosophia Reformata, reproduced in Daniel Stolcius, Viridarium Chymicum.

At the centre, within what appears to be a cave in a wooded hillside, are arrayed the seven
planetary gods, each identified with one of the metals found in the earth. Next to the gods are
emblems of the zodiacal signs they rule. The accompanying text reads as follows:

Here are portrayed

The hidden treasures of the earth;
And how the stars of the heavens
Are locked up deep in the mountains.
The earth contains
Its own planets,
To which the elements
Give their qualities and powers.
If you doubt who they are
You must look closely
At all metals.
Heaven will help you to understand.7

At the four corners of the picture are four circles or spheres which have been interpreted as
depicting the four elements8 or four kinds of fire9. The latter view seems more in line with the
appearance of the spheres, which are all flame-like and exhibit only subtle variations from one
to the next. Given the crucial role of fire in alchemy and metallurgy, a differentiation of
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elemental fire would be appropriate in an emblem depicting the mysteries of metals.

Paradoxically, however, the four fires may also be understood as the four elements. 10 In any
case, we have here a vivid and highly distilled cosmological image. It reveals the unity of above
and below, the identity of gods with heavenly bodies and minerals in the earth, and thus the
inseparability of theology, science, divination and contemplation.
Note the doctrine of the elements; the idea that we can learn about the truth of matter (its
hidden planets, their qualities and powers) by careful observation of the metals; and finally the
assertion that Heaven will help us to understand. I take this last line to be not only a divinatory
principle (what is above corresponds to what is below, and each therefore teaches us about the
other), but also a theological, an epistemological, and a cosmological one: that divine
intelligence pervades everything and thereby makes knowledge possible.
This picture and its accompanying text introduce us to the material basis of astrological
divination. Fundamental to Western astrology is the ancient theory of the four elements, or
roots as Empedocles called them, of which all things are compounded and which continually
recombine, separate, and act upon one another in characteristic ways. Earlier philosophers had
developed theories concerning the elements and the relationships among them. By the middle of
the fifth century BCE, Empedocles had worked out a theory of four unchanging, eternally
existing elements which have the status of gods, and two additional everlasting, ubiquitous
divine principles, love and strife. Love, through the power of attraction, brings particular things
into being by combining earth, fire, water and air in various proportions, while strife separates
them, causing things to cease to be and returning their matter to its elemental form.11
For over two millennia these elements provided a basis for research and philosophical
speculation about the nature of things. They no doubt arose through direct observation of sea
and sky, land and sun. To the ancient eye, however, these natural phenomena were not merely
physical as we understand the term today, but retained their sacred and imaginal character. They
were gods as well as building blocks of matter.
Divination involves an intellectual, imaginative and affective participation in this cosmos of
primordial substance and alchemical process. An important task for divination studies today is
to develop a philosophical grasp of the divinatory cosmos and how its matter differs from, yet
somehow interpenetrates and shines through, the material world studied by contemporary
physical sciences.
This paper considers the work of the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard (1884-1962) and
some of its implications for the philosophy and theory of astrology and other divinatory arts. In
addition to his rich phenomenological studies of fire, water, earth and air and his metaphysics of
imagination, Bachelard performed an alchemical separatio which may be of help to us, showing
on the one hand the ongoing necessity for scientific thinking to shed its intuitive images, and on
the other hand the power and place of poetic images in life and thought.
I take up this task with some trepidation since I am neither a scientist nor a philosopher, nor
is my French adequate to the task of reading Bachelard in his own language. As an astrological
practitioner and a researcher on divination, however, I want to call attention to the usefulness of
his work in reviving philosophical reflection on the elements and on the imagination with which
we apprehend them. Time allows only for a brief overview of his work, with the purpose of
putting some of his ideas in play.
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Bachelards life

Gaston Bachelard was born at Bar-sur-Aube, in the Champagne region of France, on 26 June
1884, to a modest shopkeeping family. 12 His was an unusual route to academic prominence.
Bachelards young manhood was partly given over to military service, including thirty-eight
months in combat during the first World War, for which he was awarded the Croix de Guerre.
He educated himself at night, at first while working long hours at the post office and later while
teaching secondary-school physics and chemistry. After receiving his doctorate from the
Sorbonne he taught philosophy at the University of Dijon, and from 1940 until his retirement in
1955 was Professor at the Sorbonne, where he held the Chair in History and Philosophy of
Science and was Director of the Institute of the History of Sciences and Technology. A beloved
teacher and an admired and influential figure in France, he was made a Commandeur de la
Lgion dhonneur and received the Grand Prix National des Lettres. He died in 1962.

Bachelard as scientist and philosopher of science

Bachelard was a thinker with an extraordinary range of interests, embracing philosophy, science,
pedagogy, alchemy, poetry and painting. He was a hands-on scientist early in life, a man who
liked to get his hands dirty. 13 The profound scientific discoveries of the twentieth century
interested him deeply, and he wished to develop a philosophy adequate to understand their basis,
their implications and their human significance. He believed that the philosophy of science had
to include a historical view and take into account the mentality of the investigator and the
scientific culture. It was Bachelard who introduced the concept of an epistemological rupture,
decades before Kuhn proposed the idea of paradigm shifts in science. 14 He insisted that
philosophy had to look not only at what scientists claimed to be doing and what principles they
were asserting, but also at their actual way of working. One must furthermore observe what they
were denying, separating from, pushing off against, and how the old rejected ideas became
enveloped and reinterpreted in the new thinking.
Bachelard viewed the history of science as a process of overcoming and discarding
imaginative perceptions of matter which cloud our ability to see phenomena as they truly are.
Today we know very well that there are fundamental truths about matter that cannot be grasped
through everyday experience and direct observation, and which in fact contradict what we see
before us. The persistent human need to imagine matter gets in the way of scientific induction.
Simply gazing at the metals with an alchemical eye was never going to produce the periodic
table! In science therefore it is necessary to psychoanalyse our images of matter (as Bachelard
put it in his first book on the elements), to become aware of the way our imagination works, its
tremendous power, and the seductiveness of habitual images. We cannot form a new idea of
matter (such as a scientific hypothesis) without this imagining power; yet the task of science is
gradually and systematically to test and critique its image-based ideas until they break down in
the face of logic and evidence. This is a full-fledged deconstructionism avant la lettre, as
Peter Caws puts it. 15 Bachelard aimed for what he called surrationalism, in which the
familiar image is transcended, by an appeal to critical reason, towards the physically
fundamental.16 Through this commitment science should be able to approach more and more
closely to reality, through concepts which transcend images.
But what is to be done with the rejected images, the imagined world, and the imagination
itself? The other side of Bachelards project was to explore material images and the poetic
imagination as a realm complementary to that of science and essential to human life and culture.
So it was that in 1938 he published two books on these two strikingly different themes: La
Formation de lesprit scientifique: Contribution une psychanalyse de la connaissance
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objective and La Psychanalyse du feu. With this latter work, Bachelard had suddenly
reintroduced into philosophy the classical elements which had fallen by the wayside since their
displacement by the modern elements of the periodic table. Henceforth he would continue to
develop his thinking along two paths: philosophy of science and philosophy of the imagination.
Our main concern here is with the imagination, yet I felt it important to outline the two sides
of Bachelards thought, both of which could be of help in our studies of divination. There
should be a critical, deconstructive dimension to our research complemented by a cultivation
and elaboration of the imaginal. Unfortunately, scientific views of divination have so far been
largely one-sided. In order to begin to see divination objectively, we have to allow ourselves to
imagine it, to be drawn into its cosmos, immersed in its kind of material truth. At the same time,
we need a mode of critical analysis that continually questions and reflects upon the images we
form in divination and about divination. Bachelard serves as an example of a philosophical
thinker who embraces both science and the poetic imagination so essential to divinatory work,
and who carefully differentiates the method and attitude appropriate to each.

Bachelard on the Elements and the poetic imagination

Bachelards works on the Elements and the poetic imagination were published between 1938
and 1961. He began with The Psychoanalysis of Fire, addressing the problem posed for the
scientific mind by a phenomenon whose initial charm is so strong that it still has the power
to warp the minds of the clearest thinkers and to keep bringing them back to the poetic fold in
which dreams replace thought and poems conceal theorems.17 Here he lays out his programme
of differentiating the poetic from the scientific. The axes of poetry and of science are opposed
to one another from the outset. All that philosophy can hope to accomplish is to make poetry
and science complementary, to unite them as two well-defined opposites.18 Among many other
themes, this volume explores the experience of reverie by the fireside, the mysteries of cooking
over an open flame, the Promethean longing to steal fire, and the legend of Empedocles fiery
death on Mt. Etna.
Already in this work can be seen the alchemical imagination so strong in Bachelard. He was
familiar with the alchemical literature of earlier centuries and often quoted sixteenth- to
eighteenth-century alchemists, but he also followed the alchemical imagery of poets of the
nineteenth and twentieth, which at times seemed to express even a more vital ability to dream
matter.19 Moreover his own daily experience and memory provided much of his material. He
always preferred the rich material and organic substances of everyday life to any ethereal
quintessence, John G. Clark writes. Bachelards is the homely alchemy of wax and honey, ink
and resin; he expatiates on the leavens that he knew as a child, seeing in paste [pte] the true
prima materia, choosing the strong smell of burned juice, blackening on the stove to suggest
calcinations, both in a literary image and in what he refers to as his own jam-making period
he also calls for greater value to be given to mud.20
Turning to another of the classical elements in Water and Dreams (1942) 21 , Bachelard
seemed less concerned to distinguish scientific from poetic thought than with beginning to
differentiate imagination itself. The imagining powers of our mind develop around two very
different axes, he wrote, hence we can distinguish two sorts of imagination: one that gives life
to the formal cause and one that gives life to the material cause -- or, more succinctly, a formal
imagination and a material imagination. 22 Nearly all of our thinking about images and
imagination is concerned with the formal aspect of the image. However,
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besides the images of form, so often evoked by psychologists of the

imagination, there are images of matter, images that stem directly from
matter. The eye assigns them names, but only the hand truly knows them. A
dynamic joy touches, moulds, and refines them. When forms, mere perishable
forms and vain images - perpetual change of surfaces - are put aside, these
images of matter are dreamt substantially and intimately. They have weight;
they constitute a heart.23

Of course, the two cannot be separated completely; in order to attract us matter must
ornament itself, making use of forms and colors, variety and metamorphosis Imagination
deserts depth, volume, and the inner recesses of substance.24 But Bachelard wishes to draw our
attention back to the intimate imagination of these vegetating and material powers:

Only an iconoclastic philosopher could undertake the long and difficult task of
detaching all the suffixes from beauty, of searching behind the obvious images
for the hidden ones, of seeking the very roots of this image-making power.
In the depths of matter there grows an obscure vegetation; black flowers
bloom in matters darkness. They already possess a velvety touch, a formula
for perfume.25

In aesthetics, Bachelard points out, there has been a neglect of the material cause;
individuality is attributed to form, and

the individualizing power of matter has been underestimated Is there not an

individuality in depth that makes matter a totality, even in its smallest
divisions? matter is the very principle that can dissociate itself from forms.
It is not the simple absence of formal activity. It remains itself despite all
distortion and division.26

It would be necessary to study forms and determine which is the matter proper to each; then
one could envision

a complete doctrine on human imagination.... Images discovered by men evolve

slowly, painfully; hence Jacques Bousquets profound remark, A new image
costs humanity as much labor as a new characteristic costs a plant. Many
attempted images cannot survive because they are merely formal play, not truly
adapted to the matter they should adorn.27

In this work Bachelard announces his project of developing a law of the four elements,
classifying the various kinds of material imagination by their connections with fire, air, water or
earth. 28 This would open new possibilities for understanding philosophical points of view
(dispositions), as well as for interpreting dreams. Each of the elements, Bachelard avers, has
its own ambivalent certitudes each is profoundly and materially a system of poetic fidelity.
In exalting them, we may think that we are being faithful to a favorite image; in reality, we are
being faithful to a primitive human feeling, to an elemental organic reality, a fundamental
oneiric temperament.29
Bachelard is inverting the usual notion of the origin of ideas and perceptions. Matter, he
maintains, is first dreamed, then perceived. Reveries educate the imagination before experiences
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do.30 If things put our ideas in order, then elementary matter does the same for our dreams.31
Although forms and concepts harden rapidly, material imagination still remains an active
power, able to renew and transform forms, which cannot renew themselves.32
As he had previously done with fire, in Water and Dreams Bachelard elaborated a
phenomenology of imaginal waters, from the domestic to the mythic, from the still and maternal
to the violent and deadly.
As he progressed through the elements, his thoughts on imagination continued to unfold and
deepen. In Air and Dreams (1943) he proposed that the four elements be understood as the
hormones of the imagination because

they activate groups of images. They help in assimilating inwardly the reality
that is dispersed among forms. They bring about the great syntheses that are
capable of giving somewhat regular characteristics to the imaginary. Imaginary
air, specifically, is the hormone that allows us to grow psychically.33

Air takes us into the realm of verticality, ascension, movement, and sublimation. 34 Being very
thin matter, it bespeaks the possibility of transcendence, of reaching an almost matterless and
unencumbered state. It is highly mobile; here, in fact, movement takes precedence over
matter.35 Although often swift, air also lifts us to the realm of slowness; Bachelard tells us that
contemplation of the constellations teaches a kind of absolute slowness.36
Inspired by his studies of air, Bachelard now proposed to add to the formal and the material
imagination a third category, the dynamic imagination.
Earth, the heaviest element, required two volumes: Earth and Reveries of Will (1943)37 for
the active extraverted side, and Earth and Reveries of Repose (1948)38 for the introverted. In the
former Bachelard explores earth as a resistant element against which man struggles; here the
smith and the alchemist are given their due, as are the minerals. The latter volume examines
images of interiority: labyrinth, house, grotto, root, vine and wine. In his books on earth he
emphasizes the immense value and particularity of work and takes psychology (apart from
Adler) to task for not having more fully explored the problem of will.
In his reflections on crystalline matter and the reveries it evokes, Bachelard touches upon the
alchemical mystery we noted earlier, in which four kinds of fire are seen as equivalent to four
different elements. Crystals and gems, he writes,

give rise to a plenitude of images quite astonishing in their variety. Here every
type of imagination finds its essential image. Fire, water, earth and even air itself
come to dream in crystalline rock.39

Bachelard proposes, therefore, to pursue

lines of imagery as [crystals] pass from one material element to another. This
will provide a measure of the extreme mobility of the imagination We will see
a remarkable synthesis of images from the depths of the earth and from the starry
sky, revealing the astonishing unity in reveries of crystals and of constellations.40

Here is a full-fledged reappropriation of the alchemical and astrological cosmos, an identity

between the celestial and the terrestrial which in Bachelards view is not merely symbolic, but
represents a true material correspondence, with a communication between substances.41
In two further works, The Poetics of Space (1958)42 and The Poetics of Reverie (1960),43
Bachelard extended his exploration of fundamental material images and the poetic imagination.
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By now, his commitment to delineating this realm had become even more radical than in his
first studies on the elements. In his introduction to The Poetics of Space, he emphasized the
necessity of leaving behind, in order to study the poetic imagination, the working habits he had
cultivated over a long career as a philosopher of science, where an edifice of knowledge or
thought was being built upon foundations laid down in the past.

For here the cultural past doesnt count One must be receptive, receptive to
the image at the moment it appears: if there be a philosophy of poetry, it must
appear and re-appear through a significant verse, in total adherence to an isolated
image; to be exact, in the very ecstasy of the newness of the image. The poetic
image is a sudden salience on the surface of the psyche, the lesser psychological
causes of which have not been sufficiently investigated. Nor can anything general
and co-ordinated serve as a basis for a philosophy of poetry. The idea of principle
or basis in this case would be disastrous, for it would interfere with the
essential psychic actuality, the essential novelty of the poem.44

He went on to affirm that the poetic image cannot be understood in terms of causality, but
rather of archetypal affinity and reverberation. 45 He intended now to undertake a
phenomenology of the imagination a study of the phenomenon of the poetic image when it
emerges into the consciousness as a direct product of the heart, soul and being of man,
apprehended in his actuality. Such a study would involve abandoning the relative degree of
objectivity he had attempted to maintain in his studies of the elements, giving up the split
thinking of the normal rationalist, and engaging subjectively at the level of the soul.46
In his last years Bachelard returned to fire, publishing The Flame of a Candle in 1961.47 At
his death there remained further incomplete writings which were assembled and edited by his
daughter Suzanne and published as Fragments of a Poetics of Fire (1988).48

Some implications of Bachelards work for astrology

Although the practice of astrology and other forms of divination continues to flourish in the
West, the philosophical and theoretical ground of the work has scarcely been cultivated for the
past several centuries. As has already been noted, the cosmological imagination that makes
divination possible has now passed primarily into the care of psychologists and artists. Only a
very few philosophers are concerned with the kind of thinking and the mode of seeing that are
the daily work of the diviner. Most research on divination in whatever cultural setting grants no
reality to the imaginal cosmos and assumes a universe in which divination simply cannot exist
other than as a confidence game, a superstition, a mode of social control, or a form of
entertainment. In order to place research in divination on firmer ground we need clarity as to
our cosmological assumptions, our objects of knowledge, the nature of our seeing, and the
overarching purposes of our work.
Bachelards body of work, giving full value to both science and the imaginal and
differentiating them so sharply, can help us first of all by clarifying that our matter is not of the
same order as that posited by science and our methodology therefore has to be entirely different.
Astrology is not a branch of social science whose primary assertions have been, or can ever be,
established through statistical measurement, but a visionary practice that works through
attunement to image. To do astrology well requires long study, clear thought, attention to
method, ethics and protocol, and thorough familiarity with traditional images and interpretations.
None of these requirements, however, can force a result, any more than sitting down at a table
with a pen and paper can force a poem to appear on the page. The chart and
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the astrological techniques are not reliable machines whose daily output we can control or
predict.
Nevertheless, just as serious poets do manage to crank out poems with some regularity,
astrologers get the insights they and their clients need on a tolerably frequent basis. The question
is, where do poems and astrological insights come from? It is my belief that they have the same
source - imagination - and arrive in essentially the same way. What we are watching for as
diviners, what we must (as Bachelard says) be receptive to, is that sudden salience on the
surface of the psyche, the moment when an image stands forth that has no history. It is this
openness to the image and its power to reveal and renew that separates authentic divination from
fatalistic prediction. This is a profoundly psychological mode of divination, one which does not
reduce people to diagnostic (or zodiacal) categories, but uses the ritual of astrological
questioning and contemplation to focus awareness and induce receptivity to the healing or
renewing image.
We can profitably read Bachelard, then, side by side with Jung and the archetypal
psychologists who share the same radical understanding of the poetic imagination as an
autonomous creative force, and of the relationship of soul, image and archetype.
For astrologers whose daily work involves a brisk trade in water, fire, air and earth,
Bachelards studies of the elements are of immense value. He has reclaimed for us the true
material basis of our discipline. To incorporate his contribution into astrological theory and
philosophy we need to read his work in depth, contemplatively. To immerse oneself in his heady
brew of mythological and literary themes, household arts, childhood memories, alchemical lore,
night fears and country pleasures, all bearing the stamp of the elemental matter in which they
are rooted, is to feed the soul and educate the mind about the true matter of our work and our
life.
This immersion has first of all the effect of complicating and deliteralizing our
understanding of the elements. So vast is the range of elemental images, so strangely do they
resist each other, combust and flow together, that we quickly leave behind their function as
convenient baskets into which to sort human types, motives, needs or activities. Any notion that
we have a definite grasp on an element dissolves as we see how readily one element can imitate
or transform into another. So fantastic are the elemental images that it would be absurd to take
them literally, yet how applicable they often turn out to be, at a very practical level, to the next
hours consultation or ones own daily problem.
The more we read, the more Bachelards aim of drawing our attention back beneath the
forms to their elemental substrate tends to be realised. Many people find his books difficult to
get through, because we are in the habit of reading in order to extract information or key ideas -
reading in order to finish the book! Bachelards prose resists this approach. It slows the reader
down and positions her close to where the image is flowing or congealing, weeping or singing,
so close that it would seem impolite to get up and leave. This slowness of reading and the
difficulty of summarizing or extracting concepts from the page seems to me to have a
philosophical effect. As the craving for information and mastery gives way, the love of
wisdom is awakened and one becomes attentive to the obscure vegetation, the black flowers that
bloom in the depths of matter.
This type of reading affects the soul of the astrologer while also teaching philosophical and
theoretical principles. One has actually to be moved by the pathos of the elements, to give
oneself over to them, in order to realize their dignity and originary power and renounce the idea
that they are mere constructs, handy tools, abstractions, or just metaphors.
Most work in contemporary psychology is concerned with the development and successful
adaptation of the human individual. Astrology, where it has not been distorted by this cultural
influence, helps us in our adaptation to this world but also directs our love back toward the
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cosmos. The archetype of wholeness, too great a burden for the individual personality to carry,
can be projected back into the world where it formerly served to contain us. In the presence of
the horoscope, an icon of the imaginal cosmos, we are encouraged to desire not only our own
well-being and good fortune but the good of all beings and the harmony of the world. To
meditate on the elements may be even more beneficial in this regard than to focus on the well-
articulated forms of the zodiac, stars and planets, or the figures and stories of the gods, because
it takes us to an even more fundamental place.
Many other aspects of Bachelards thought would nourish theoretical and philosophical
reflection on astrology. I shall leave those to another time, however, and conclude with a few
lines Bachelard wrote concerning divination:

There is about all divination a keen and melancholy spirituality, a blend of

secret serenity and faint anguish, for the diviner always gives a little of his own
light to illuminate others. The eye of the diviner manages to be at once
tender and sharp; it holds both pity and courage. the divining gaze always
obeys simultaneously two contrary principles of penetration: intelligence and
sympathy, the power of the spirit and the tact of the heart.49

[T]he future itself is essentially a face. Things answer our gaze. They appear
indifferent to us simply because we regard them with an indifferent eye. But to
the bright eye everything is a mirror; the sincere and serious look sees depth in
all things.50

Appendix: Bachelards horoscope

For the interest of astrologers, I include a few reflections on Bachelards natal horoscope
(Figure 3).

Figure 3. Natal horoscope of Gaston Bachelard

26 June 1884, 11:00 am LMT
Bar-sur-Aube, France 48N14, 04E43
Tropical zodiac, Geocentric, Topocentric Houses51
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Jung commented that he regarded his own contribution to his field as a subjective
confession,52 suggesting that a theory is an expression of the theorists individual character,
ancestry, and disposition. Astrologically, we could say that a persons thought is not merely
subjective and confessional, but an expression of the objective, archetypal ground of his or her
existence, which shows itself in the symbolic map of the cosmos as viewed from the time and
place of birth. Reflection on the natal horoscope of a scholar, writer or artist helps us to
appreciate what the individual brings that is unique, its brilliance as well as its limitations. It is
not that the philosophers horoscope explains his thought; still less does it explain it away in
terms of personal complexes. To include horoscopy and biography in our research is not to
reduce a persons thought to his upbringing or historical and social conditioning, nor to reduce it
to causes in the stars, but to engage in a mode of contemplation through which the life course,
personal qualities, theories, creative products and achievements all are seen to reveal an
originary (arche) pattern or stamp (typos). It must be emphasized that in this type of research,
unlike that of science, no positive knowledge is produced. The aim is not to gather and analyze
data, but to cultivate a manner of seeing (theoria) that meaningfully links different levels of
reality in a single image. Work on a particular horoscope, then, is an tude which trains and
exercises the diviners mind.
In Bachelards map the Sun, Moon and planets are clustered in a wedge covering just over
one-third of the zodiac (122 degrees), suggesting a highly focused personality. The area of
concentration covers primarily the ninth through twelfth houses, with Uranus lying just inside
the first house, indicating that the emphasis in the persons life is likely to be on collective and
impersonal questions (these houses being philosophical, professional, scientific, humanitarian,
global, and mystical in orientation). The planets and the ascendant, however, are all in spring
and summer signs. Sun and Venus in Cancer, Mercury and Saturn in Gemini, and Moon and
Jupiter in Leo emphasize the personal and the near-at-hand, the creative, ones own self-
expression. Gemini and Virgo want to learn, teach and communicate at a practical, hands-on
level. These early signs bring a certain freshness, warmth and joy to the sober concerns of the
late houses, while being placed in the late houses gives the early-sign planets an impersonal
perspective on personal matters and on human existence itself.
Virgo, sign of the student and the teacher, rises in the chart, ruled by Mercury which is
dignified in its own sign Gemini and in honor of elevation conjunct the Midheaven. Mercury
also rules the tenth house of career and public standing and conjoins Saturn, ruler of the sixth
house of teaching, in a stellium of planets in the ninth house of higher education. It is not
surprising therefore that Bachelard, though not from a family of educators or intellectuals (he
was the son and grandson of cobblers 53 ), was drawn to teaching. As he retired from the
Sorbonne in 1955 at the age of 70, it was, as he said, not with a merry heart, for to him
living and teaching [had] been the very same thing.54 But this was not a stereotypical Virgoan
schoolmaster with practical concerns for the young persons adaptation to reality and society.
The wedge in Bachelards chart is framed by outer planets Neptune and Pluto in the Taurus-
ruled ninth house and Uranus conjunct the Ascendant in Virgo, as if placing the ordinary
personal and social concerns of Sun, Moon and inner planets in a collective or transpersonal
context. Education for Bachelard was a matter of destiny, of culture and ultimately of
humanness. Mary McAllester says that in Bachelards view,

Human beings need to know , and they do not develop without this need.
This knowledge is not for any practical end, but for its own sake: school is not
made for society, he declares, but society for school, school is an end it is
the chief end. The teachers duty, body and soul as he puts it, to the
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younger generation is to teach the human value of science, the creativity of the
human mind against everyday experience, and against received ideas and
values, the creativity that the poet shares through his language, and which
ensures human being by calling it into question.55

The unfixing of the mind accomplished by poetry is also to be worked upon through
scientific experimentation, which will not merely confirm what one already knows, but break it
down and transform [the] mind completely. The complete and continuing transformation of
the mind is Bachelards project.56
The Sun in the tenth house typically shows a drive toward professional achievement and
public recognition, a tendency to rise to the top through a combination of disciplined effort,
talent and charisma. The individual is recognisable to others as a leader or an authority and has
the confidence and vitality to bring something forward into the public sphere or to take
responsibility for it professionally. The Sun represents the radiant energy of the heart, and the
sign in which it is placed indicates the nature of the fire that burns in the persons inner hearth
(recall the differentiation of fire depicted in figure 2 above). The placement of Bachelards Sun
in the Moon-ruled water sign Cancer helps us to see why, despite his strong scientific bent,
water was his favourite element, and why he was so comfortable with flux, with the feminine
and the maternal, and with poetic language.
The Cancer Sun is in mutual reception with the Moon in Leo (i.e., each is visiting in the sign
ruled by the other), a felicitous combination for a teacher, as it rejoices in nurturing and
encouraging the young and finds its own fulfillment in their growth and self-expression. Jupiter
in Leo and Venus in Cancer augment this Sun-Moon, Cancer-Leo theme.
The Moon in artistic Leo receives a square (90-degree aspect) from Neptune in Taurus,
suggesting a powerful imagination and an intense focus on giving form to ones creative vision.
The Neptune aspect may also impart a degree of glamour or charisma and a gift for public
performance, especially with both bodies strongly aspected and visible in the upper Houses of
the chart. The Sun stands at the midpoint of the Moon-Neptune square, in a semi-square (45
degrees) to each of those bodies; it makes no other strong aspects. Here the Sun is the release
point for the Moon-Neptune relationship. This seems to me the primary astrological signature of
Bachelards concern with the poetic imagination. Considering this figure, we see how natural it
is for Bachelard to turn to the poets (especially the watery French poets) for material, and how
powerful is the impulse to create a fully realized philosophy and theory of the image. It is also a
signature of charisma. Christina Chimisso has produced a fascinating analysis of the way in
which the engaging white-bearded Bachelard became an iconic figure during his lifetime,
mythologized by his students and admirers, carrying the projection of the archetypal philosopher,
sage and patriarch.57
Venus, ruler of the ninth of philosophy, is retrograde in Cancer, near the midpoint of Uranus
and Neptune. As ruler of earthy Taurus, she grounds this philosophers work in a respect for the
material, the tactile, the beautiful and the sensuous. Despite his severe strictures as a scientist
against the allure of the image, Bachelards writing radiates the joy of daily life in the material
world, overflows with sensuous images, and testifies to what I can only characterize as a faith in
stuff. Venus retrograde in highly sensitive Cancer, moving downward and inward, registers the
world, its beautiful and terrifying images, and its elemental matter at a profound level and at the
same time observes them, in a detached eleventh-house way, in order to place them
philosophically.
The Uranus-Neptune trine bracketing all the other planets is suggestive in relation to
Bachelards unusual career path: he lost out (Neptune) in a crucial early academic competition
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(ninth house) but continued studying on his own, eventually earning two doctorates. Uranus,
planet of original genius and eccentricity, rising in Virgo, sign of the student, makes for a classic
autodidact. Uranus also breaks the bounds of time (Saturns sphere), in this case defying the
normal timetable according to which one was expected to complete a professional qualification.
So it was that the would-be engineer instead eventually became a philosopher of science
(Uranus) and of poetry and alchemy (Neptune), a pathbreaking thinker who despite his elevated
Saturn-Mercury conjunction emphasized the necessity for epistemological breaks and
revolutions in thought.
With his Uranian eccentricity, one wonders whether Bachelard would have received such a
degree of professional and public honour in an Anglophone country; Arthur Goldhammer
comments, however, that except for his humble origins Bachelard fit the pattern of a classic
French intellectual:

The French intellectual (the word itself speaks volumes) is carrying on a

tradition. This is so even for the thinker who styles himself a revolutionary, an
iconoclast. Indeed, it goes a long way, I think, toward explaining why
revolutionaries and iconoclasts are so common a feature of the French
intellectual scene. The ancien rgime has to survive in one way or another in
order to be overthrown.58

Saturn conjunct Mercury in the ninth near the Midheaven shows the long, slow, disciplined
climb to success from provincial postman to endowed professorship and the Lgion dhonneur.
Could there possibly be a more apt signature for a postmaster than Mercury-Saturn-Gemini-
Midheaven? Mercury-Hermes carries messages between one village and the next, and between
this world and the next. In its own sign, Gemini, it does this effortlessly with one hand tied
behind its back; conjunct Saturn, it takes on this function as a serious responsibility; conjunct
the Midheaven as well, it becomes a public trust. Saturn and Mercurius are also a crucial pair in
the transformations of alchemy. Peter Caws remarks on Bachelards unusual career:

On the whole it seems to me that it would be a good thing for more

philosophers to have been postmen. The mtier may not be accidental: apart
from the letter-scales Bachelard refers to as having given him his idea of weight,
there is a hermetic side to the postmans activity he is the point of contact
with the world beyond, he brings sealed messages from distant origins, there is
no knowing what marvels or portents they may not contain; at the same time
nothing can surprise him, he is the very image of persistence and reliability, of
local intimacy and homely order. And when the postman himself leaves for the
outside world - for Dijon, for Paris - he takes with him this imperturbable sense
of the familiar, and his concern continues to be with the firm materiality of the
world, now from the scientific point of view.59

The trine from Mercury, Saturn and the Midheaven in Gemini (sign of the Twins) to the
Libra north node in the Second House, along with their sextile to the Leo Moon, suggest
Bachelards ease and charm in communicating his sophisticated ideas to students. The Mercurial
emphasis in the chart correlates with his wide range of interests, multiplicity of projects in play,
and conversational grace. Bachelard was classically Geminian in his dialectical approach to
thinking and in maintaining two parallel tracks of work, in science and poetry.
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Mars, the masculine principle of penetration, separation and exploration, when situated in
Virgo has a tremendous will to investigate, to discriminate, to master his craft and instruct or
initiate others in it. Mars in this exacting earth sign craves hands-on application and rigorous
testing of its ideas. Bachelards Mars placement seems clearly reflected in his regard for craft
and his love of laboratory work, as well as in his passion for teaching. Its position in the twelfth
house of solitude, institutions, and hidden or incipient knowledge is excellent for research, in
which one needs a considerable tolerance for being shut up alone with only ones own
supervision. This Mars is less the heroic warrior than the alchemist or the smith: he has perhaps
a touch of Vulcan or Hephaistos, the god who laboured at his underground forge to create all the
beautiful objects required by the other gods. Bachelard understood, and no doubt lived, the
alchemical dimension of everyday work.
The situation of Mars, ruling as it does the eighth house of death, sacrifice and
transformation; placed in the twelfth of institutions, solitude and renunciation; semisquare
Venus, planet of love; and squared by Saturn, lord of loss and limitation, may reflect the
sacrifices involved in Bachelards military service. Mars is the soldier, the twelfth house the
army, Mars-Saturn the conflict that devastated Europe and decimated a generation of young men.
Not only was his career deferred for several years while he was away at the front; more
tragically, the war took up almost the whole of his brief married life: he was a newlywed when
he was called up, and his wife died in 1920, the year following his demobilisation, leaving him
to bring up their small daughter alone. While Venus in Cancer indicates a depth of longing for
family and home, the stressful Mars aspect shows the cost of war to domestic happiness. The
previously-mentioned square of Neptune to the Leo Moon similarly suggests disappointment or
loss in love.
In this same connection we note that Jupiter, ruler of the fourth house of domestic life and
emotional roots and co-ruler of the seventh of marriage and partnership, makes no major aspects
to other planets, but is semisquare both Midheaven and Ascendant, at the midpoint of the fourth
quadrant (houses ten through twelve), a sensitive point of release for that heavily-weighted
segment of the chart. It is situated in Leo in the Cancer-ruled eleventh house (an excellent outlet
for generous, expansive Jupiter), along with the retrograde Venus in Cancer and the Moon in
Leo. The eleventh is the house of friendship and collegiality and of cultural creativity: what one
contributes to ones own field and also to the broader development of thought, art, politics,
community life, and so forth. A house which by nature tends toward detachment and objectivity
is here suffused with the depth of personal feeling of Venus in Cancer and the exuberant warmth
of Moon and Jupiter in Leo, making for a hearty, approachable nature. Bachelards innate
family feeling must have found a significant outlet in nurturing his students and colleagues
and his own intellectual children, his books, on which he continued to work up until his death.
I have here made a start at imagining Bachelard astrologically. In reflecting on a horoscope
in this way, we do not come into possession of secret knowledge, whether of facts about the
person, of his inner world, or of his destiny. What we may hope to do is to enhance our
awareness of the richness and particularity of the world and perhaps glimpse the human quality
and cultural contribution of a particular individual in an archetypal light.

_____________________________________

The author wishes to thank Roger Manley for permission to reproduce his photograph of J. B. Murry and
Theresa Segreti of the American Visionary Art Museum for supplying the digital image; Adam McLean
for permission to reproduce the J. B. Mylius image and for helpful correspondence regarding the Stolcius
epigram; and Dorian Gieseler Greenbaum for sharing her materials on quality, element and creation in
ancient Greek thought.
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1 Untitled poem by Rainer Maria Rilke, in Ahead of All Parting: The Selected Poetry and Prose of Rainer Maria Rilke, ed. and tr.
Stephen Mitchell (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 191. Another reading of the third line (ausgeschlossen vom Sternen-
Ma) is to be excluded from the stars measure. Uncollected Poems, Rainer Maria Rilke, tr. Edward Snow, bilingual edition
(New York: North Point Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1996), 218-19.
2 This paper was presented on 3 October 2004 at the Imaginal Cosmos conference at the University of Kent. The

exhibit Holy H2O: Fluid Universe continued at the American Visionary Art Museum from 2 October 2004 through
4 September 2005 (for further information see the Museums publication Visions, number 10 [2004]).
3 See Patrick Curry, Divination, Enchantment and Platonism in this volume, 35-46.
4 The cosmological perspective is of course absent from most schools of psychology, but can be found in the depth-

psychological tradition growing out of the work of C. G. Jung. See for example James Hillman, Cosmology for Soul: From
Universe to Cosmos, Sphinx, A Journal for Archetypal Psychology and the Arts 2 (1989), 17-33.
5 Quoted in C. G. Jung, Psychology and Alchemy, tr. R.F.C. Hull, 2d ed., Vol. 12 of the Collected Works (Princeton: Princeton

University Press, 1968), 218 [hereafter CW].

6 Ibid., 219.
7 Daniel Stolcius, Viridarium Chymicum (Frankfurt: Lucas Jennis, 1624). Stolciuss Latin epigram was written to accompany the

engraving by Johann Daniel Mylius (fig. 2), reproduced in the Viridarium from Myliuss Philosophia Reformata (Frankfurt:
Lucas Jennis, 1622). I am unable to locate the source of this English translation. Another version is given in John Read, Prelude
to Chemistry: An Outline of Alchemy, Its Literature and Relationships (Cambridge/London: MIT Press, 1966 [originally
published 1936]), 265-6: [T]hou seest laid open the bowels of the vast earth Out of doubt, the earth itself possesses its own
planets, to which the elements furnish their powers. If thou dost doubt what they are, with watchful mind contemplate the metals,
so shall the sky be known unto thee. Here the principle as above, so below is applied such that the higher things are known
through the lower.
8 Read, ibid., 266.
9 Adam McLean, www.alchemywebsite.com/s_mylius.html : At each corner is a sphere of fire.
10 The idea of four kinds of fire corresponding to the different transformative processes of the four elements appears earlier in

the same series by Mylius. Emblem 10 depicts Four Grades (of Fire), according to McLean, ibid., who describes the scene as
follows: Four women with solar heads sit at a table. In the sky above are two winds blowing towards four flaming flasks set
above the zodiac with its signs. Each sun-woman has before her one of the zodiacal symbols (Aries, Scorpio, Libra, Capricorn,
exponents of fire, water, air and earth respectively). McLean comments on this emblem: The Putrefaction [of which this
emblem represents a sub-stage] must take place through four different fires, that is it must work through an experience of the
four elements, or in our soul the hardening earthy structures in our being, the dissolving fluidity of soul fires, the airiness of our
beings that seek to rise within us, and the transformative energy of fire itself. The Alchemical Engravings of Mylius, Text tr.
Patricia Tahil, commentary by Adam McLean (Edinburgh: Magnum Opus Hermetic Sourceworks, 1984), 115. The full series of
emblems by Mylius may be viewed online at www.levity.com/alchemy/amcl_mylius.html .
11 On the history of the elements in Greek thought, see David Furley, The Greek Cosmologists, Vol. I. The formation of the

atomic theory and its earliest critics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), especially ch. 7 on Empedocles. For
primary texts by Empedocles with commentary, see Empedocles: The Extant Fragments, ed. M. R. Wright (New Haven and
London: Yale University Press, 1981). Studies on Empedocles include Peter Kingsley, Ancient Philosophy, Mystery, and Magic:
Empedocles and the Pythagorean Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), and Helle Lambros, Empedocles: A Philosophical
Investigation (University of Alabama Press, 1976).
12 For Bachelards natal horoscope and some reflections on it, see the appendix to this paper.
13 Arthur Goldhammer, Translators Preface to Gaston Bachelard, The New Scientific Spirit (Boston: Beacon Press, 1984), xix.
14 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1962).
15 Peter Caws, Yoricks World: Science and the Knowing Subject (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 276.
16 Ibid.
17 Gaston Bachelard, The Psychoanalysis of Fire, tr. Alan C. M. Ross; preface by Northrop Frye (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964),

2.
18 Ibid.
19 John G. Clark, The Place of Alchemy in Bachelards Oneiric Criticism, in Mary McAllester, ed., The Philosophy and

Poetics of Gaston Bachelard (Washington: Center for Advanced Research in Phenomenology and University Press of America,
1989), 134-5.
20 Ibid., 138.
21 From this point forward, in introducing Bachelards works, the date of original publication in French will be given in

parentheses in the text, while English editions will be cited in the footnotes.
22 Gaston Bachelard, Water and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, tr. Edith R. Farrell (Dallas: The Dallas

Institute of Humanities and Culture [DIHC], 1983), 1. Emphasis in original.

23 Ibid. Emphasis in original.
24 Ibid., 2.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid. In this passage we can hear echoes of Empedocles, for whom this was the nature of an element: however

finely divided or mixed, it remained itself.

 126

27 Ibid., 2-3. Compare the Rosarium Philosophorum, and Jung, on true versus fantastic imagination.
28 Ibid., 3.
29 Ibid., 5.
30 Ibid., 16.
31 Ibid., 134.
32 Ibid.
33 Gaston Bachelard, Air and Dreams: An Essay on the Imagination of Movement, tr. Edith R. Farrell and C. Frederick Farrell

(Dallas: DIHC, 1988), 11. Emphasis in original.

34 Air is related to the alchemical operation of sublimatio, as earth is to coagulatio, water to solutio, fire to calcinatio.
35 Air and Dreams, 8.
36 Ibid., 180.
37 Gaston Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will: An Essay on the Imagination of Matter, tr. Kenneth Haltman (Dallas: DIHC,

2002).
38 An English translation is in progress under the auspices of DIHC.
39 Bachelard, Earth and Reveries of Will, 222.
40 Ibid., 222-3. Emphasis in original.
41 Ibid., 224.
42 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Space, tr. Maria Jolas (Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
43 Gaston Bachelard, The Poetics of Reverie: Childhood, Language, and the Cosmos, tr. Daniel Russell (Boston: Beacon Press,

1969).
44 Poetics of Space, xv. Emphasis added.
45 Ibid., xvi.
46 Ibid., xviii.
47
Gaston Bachelard, The Flame of a Candle, tr. Joni Campbell (Dallas: DIHC, 1988).
48 Gaston Bachelard, Fragments of a Poetics of Fire, ed. Suzanne Bachelard, tr. Kenneth Haltman (Dallas: DIHC, 1990).
49 Gaston Bachelard, The Right to Dream, tr. J. A. Underwood (Dallas: DIHC, 1988), 47.
50 Ibid., 49.
51 Solar Fire chart, based on birth data from AstroDataBank 3.0.
52 CW Vol. 18, 275.
53 Goldhammer, in New Scientific Spirit, xv.
54 McAllester, Philosophy and Poetics, 9.
55 Ibid., 9-10.
56 Ibid., 10.
57 Christina Chimisso, Gaston Bachelard, Critic of Science and the Imagination (London: Routledge, 2001), ch. 1.
58 Goldhammer, in New Scientific Spirit, xxi.
59 Caws, Yoricks World, 274.